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Microsoft & NVIDIA Have Been Closer Than Realized

06-07-2011, 10:20 AM

Phoronix: Microsoft & NVIDIA Have Been Closer Than Realized

Generating a fair amount of interest the past two days has been news that Microsoft and NVIDIA are in a relationship much closer than many realize. Dating back to an SEC paper in the year 2000, Microsoft carries the right of first and last refusal to purchase NVIDIA. While many Linux users are quite fond of NVIDIA hardware and their proprietary graphics driver for being stable and largely carrying a performance and feature parity to the Windows driver, there's been many emails sent over to Phoronix about this news...

I'm not sure why this is a story. It seems perfectly reasonable to me: MS was worried about the possibility that Sony/Nintendo/Sega would come along and buy out their single-source Xbox GPU vendor to kill Xbox, so an agreement was put in place that allowed MS to become the buyer instead.

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so... is this just a rumor? because imo this is complete bs. xbox 360 uses ati graphics. the 360 is selling better than ps3, which uses nvidia, and its selling much better than the original xbox, which also used nvidia. microsoft buying nvidia is not going to help them unless they decide to use them for their next gaming console.

correct me if i'm wrong, but i've never heard of nvidia's mobile chips (like tegra) being on a windows phone. they're on android platforms, something MS hates very much. nvidia's cuda stuff is, from what i've seen, about 65% windows, 45% linux, and the rest is other OSes. cuda is a big deal to nvidia, and they are very linux focused with it.

nvidia may no focus too much on the generic desktop user or gamer for linux, but they know linux is where a notable amount of their income comes from. MS buying them out is not only unlikely, but even if they do i highly doubt it will hurt the linux community. i noticed once MS bought skype there has already been an update within a couple weeks, and it actually had notable fixes in it.

to me, something is not worth posting until there is definite proof of it. i know michael is just doing his job and probably is tired of hearing people PM him about this rumor, but rumors are not newsworthy.

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Nvidia won't open their drivers largely due to two reasons, in ascending order of importance;

the source very likely includes licensed code they're legally prohibited from releasing to the public. Remember how Sun couldn't open up Java overnight without first rewriting parts of it. There's also little incentive to replace those bits with clean-room reverse-engineered implementations, since the vast majority of their end users simply do not care in the slightest. As long as their Windows drivers yield satisfactory framerates in games, they are happy consumers.

if they released the source they would be at the mercy of patent trolls with hundreds and hundreds of generic software "patents" in their portfolios, that they can use to sue Nvidia for damages in ridiculous sums. Regardless of if they win or not, the legal costs alone would be nontrivial. Even Red Hat pays off patent trolls to avoid taking it to court.

As for adopting KMS, there's probably a discouraging amount of work involved to make that happen while still retaining the core of the driver that's shared with other platforms. I do hope they find a neat solution though, perhaps by shifting some of the existing code into the kernel module.

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Why nvidia doesn't support linux? Simple. Because it doesn't make any money from Open Source Drivers.

If you want to follow your logic through to the end, they don't make ANY money off of ANY drivers AT ALL -- I guess that it makes sense to hand out undocumented hardware without any software at all.

The workstation/render people don't care and have something that works so everyone is OK.

What do they have that works? You can't possibly be referring to the nvidia blob pos, can you? I completely gave up on that because it DOES NOT WORK, at least not predictably or consistently. Nouveau is at least usable. My *ONLY* remaining nvidia GPU is running on that. Everything else is switched to AMD now, because they seem to actually have decent drivers!

What do they have that works? You can't possibly be referring to the nvidia blob pos, can you? I completely gave up on that because it DOES NOT WORK, at least not predictably or consistently. Nouveau is at least usable. My *ONLY* remaining nvidia GPU is running on that. Everything else is switched to AMD now, because they seem to actually have decent drivers!

Edit: Oh, I KNOW what they have that works... AMD FIREPRO.

The fact that you have problems doesn't mean that everyone else has and up to a few years ago nvidia was the dominant played even in desktop linux graphics. And the blob still works just fine for many people.

Also i have to remind you here that even AMD doesn't "officially" support open source drivers. The fact that they hand out documentation i see it either as an exceptionally kind gesture or -from a business POV- as an attempt to get more share in the linux desktop. And i get the impression that this somehow worked and more people are directed at AMD products -bridgman can tell us if they had any increase in sales. Hiring more open devs probably had more to do with trying to offer better support to their embedded clients.

All that people care is money NOT ideology/kindness.

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so... is this just a rumor? because imo this is complete bs. xbox 360 uses ati graphics. the 360 is selling better than ps3, which uses nvidia, and its selling much better than the original xbox, which also used nvidia. microsoft buying nvidia is not going to help them unless they decide to use them for their next gaming console.

The agreement is from 11+ years ago, when the original Xbox was still under development, and Nvidia supplied the chipset (including IGP) for that system. The thing about this is that MS was buying the chips from Nvidia, and so was dependent upon Nvidia's supplying the chips for as long as Xbox was being sold. That ended up biting them in a different way (short version: MS wanted Nvidia to throw away a bunch of southbridge chips because the embedded boot ROM was found to be exploitable, and Nvidia wanted MS to pay for the chips) so the 360 GPU is managed a bit differently (MS reportedly contracts the foundry and just pays licensing/consulting fees to ATI/AMD rather than buying the chips from them).